That still leaves Quanta, obviously my tool of choice. I admit I think of it more as a web development platform and it currently plugs in Kate as an editor, though it may be fully pluggable in the future. I already know how popular Quanta is. I'd bet if anyone wanted to see what the most popular Linux web development tool is Quanta would easily come up first. So I'm not going to get excited over another web poll. However given that Bluefish is in there it seems incongruous. It would seem logical if that is how they structure the category that both Quanta and Screem would be there.

It's quite common for people to berate web polls for being arbitrary and inaccurate. In fact if you wanted to be more comprehensive it would seem a few other editors would be in there and it would be categorized for console, general purpose and special purpose editors. Anyway, if I can't vote honestly for Quanta (30,000 source downloads on a major revision is already a pretty good vote I think) then I can't see voting.

SIX release candidates and in proportion to its complexity as many bugs as the MS Windows environment. While KDE is infinitely better than GNOME ("but OK buttons are confusing, it says so in my research paper, I've a PhD in UI design you know!!"), I still think MS can relax on the Desktop while the state of the art is merely catch-up, of features both good and bad...

About the catch-up thingy:
Haven't been using much KDE lately, have we?

About the bugs:
The big difference between KDE (or other Open Source projects) and Windows is that
bugs are not kept in secret basements. Everyone can post/fix/comment on a bug
publicly. Believe me, if there was a bugs.microsoft.com, more than a million MS-bugs would
have been posted.

About the six release candidates:
Everyone knows that the KDE 3.1 would have been released almost a month ago. The
team decided to take it easy and fix some security holes that were discovered. Now *this*
is what I call responsibility towards the end user, especielly if you consider that the end user
does not pay anything and KDE is provided without any warranty.

many of the bugs in bugs.kde.org are old and/or not very helpful to the developers (e.g. don't have enough info to accurately address)

if you (and yes, i mean you in the sense that you can actually do this) were to go through and help go through the bugs and ask for more info where appropriate, try and duplicate the bugs locally, merge duplicate bugs, etc... we'd end up with fewer reports in the system. this would also increase the usefulness of the bugs system (which already very useful) as there would be less noise and more signal.

also remember that many of the reports in the bugs system are wishlist items.

of course, any more than 0 bugs is too many. and of course, we'll never have 0 bugs. KDE is too complex, too big and has too much new development for a zero bug count reality. the good news is that the developers are getting much more use out of the new bugs.kde.org than they did with the old one, judging from activity and raw report #s.

Since you are talking in that order of magnitude you might also want to take a look at http://www.pivx.com/larholm/unpatched/ for a list of 19 known but still not patched vulnerabilities in Microsoft's core product Internet Explorer, the oldest one dating one year back. All of Microsoft service and bug fixes releases could fix those vulnerabilities, they should have the man power and the money to do so easily. On the other hand KDE has got one known vulnerability and that leads to a delay for a complete source review to get rid of it. I don't think you are bitching at the right place here.

I also was astounded to not find Kate listed under editors. The number of votes that KWin received are surprinsing, given that then I didn't expect KWin to be listed as a window manager, after Kate had been ignored.

KMail does the trick great for me. The only thing I have to regret is that I cannot connect to the addressbook we have in the company. It's Exchange stuff. I guess, I can have my calendar, my IMAP mail, but not the non-LDAP addressbook, right? Given the flamewars around KMail branches, I have the impression it's under quick development, despite already being good enough. That's great.

Perhaps GNOME people are busy fixing bugs instead of playing around getting votes in, lets face it, very badly organised polls! The choice of applications in each category are clearly an 'off the top of my head' list by someone rather than a considered nomination of projects released in the year?

The story has indeed been posted at gnomedesktop.org, just took a little longer to show up. The polls are meant to be open to all projects - having a release during the year was not a prerequisite (atleast not this year). After looking at Kate it has been added to the Editor of the Year Award (it would have been added quicker had the suggestion been made in the poll itself). Furthur suggestions are welcome.